Mindfulness (Academic Essay)

Mindfulness in Plain English (history & usage)

Robert Wright of Princeton and U. Penn has stated:

“Your brain did not evolve to make you happy. It evolved in a way that would get your genes into the gene pool.”[1]

The Model

The functions that your brain engages in to accomplish this task begin with viewing and forming a mental model of the world through your senses. In that process your brain evaluates things, people, events, locations, etc. on a scale of first whether or not they are meaningful to the survival of your DNA, and then, if meaningful, are they good for you or bad for you? Most things your brain encounters through the senses are pretty neutral and the seriousness of those that do matter ranges from mild to very severe. The judgments your brain subsequently makes and stores about them are what we might call “dualistic”, on a scale of good to bad. Then, as we encounter a sensual trigger, your brain recalls the judgments it made in that regard and pushes you to behave in an approach/avoid manner[2].

All this has been well known in science, if articulated somewhat differently, for a good period of time. However, what has not been widely known in the west is that a portion of the brain that, in this secular mindfulness model, we will call the “Self”, after a judgment is made, takes one more step. The Self portion of the brain will impel you to obey its judgment in each particular matter, to acquire something it has judged to be good and to stay away from something bad. These 2 groups of judgments have been called “Attachments” and “Aversions” and we will retain these monikers. Your Self impels you to feel that things will not be right unless you have executed its judgments, that is to approach “good” things and avoid or eliminate the “bad”. Thus, each of us is relentlessly plagued at various times with a myriad of various levels of dissatisfactions, yielding a chronic level of anguish. This word, dukkha in Sanskrit(dukka in Pali) , was translated originally into English as “suffering”, but virtually all modern mindfulness and Buddhist scholars understand that word is not nearly as precise as “anguished dissatisfaction”[3]. For brevity I will henceforth use the Sanskrit word for it, dukkha.

This dukkha is experienced in a number of ways. Since the world contains a number of things, people and situations that your Self has judged, there are usually a number of judgments being pushed at you by your Self, hence multiple feelings of dukkha, experienced in a number of ways. A low level of dukkha is often referred to in mindfulness medicine as “feeling tone.” One can experience mild depression, mild irritation, anxiety and a very mild jubilation, all at the same time. This feeling tone provides a springboard for further dukkha elicited by subsequent triggers[4].

Feeling tone, however, is the least of the problems that dukkha presents. Very often the judgment that your Self makes is an evolutionary mismatch, i.e. evolved back in ancient hunter-gatherer days when we were dragging a club along the savannas. Responding reactively to such an impulse often leads to a plethora of undesirable outcomes: injurious conflict(both physical and psychological), depression, a jubilation which will fade away later into depression, a decrease in self-worth, and generally just an unpleasant feeling that “things are not as I want them to be.”

Furthermore, we react to dukkha by identifying with the judgment that precipitated it. “I am the person who wants this and hates that.” By inscribing that into our self-image, it makes it difficult to free oneself from those feelings or to behave in an alternate fashion. In psychiatry, that is especially noted with people identified as “impulsive”. The Self is everything to them and they obey it without question.

Another serious problem with the dualistic view we have of life is that it is entirely self-centered. It is largely about “me”. In fact, “me” is just a concept that your brain created to identify the resources it has to protect and replicate your genes, i.e. your body. Only when other biologically or culturally evolved imperatives such as mating, family and parochial altruism intervene, does your Self look outside itself. Therefore, dukkha has a strong divisive effect in social situations.

It was discovered, first in Eastern religions, later brought into the west, that there is a solution to the problem of dukkha. The solution involves a change in mental outlook, a practice in which one sees that…

While knowing that my Self is the source of feelings and impulses that are problematical(I am creating it; it’s not “all happening to me”), I am not the sum total of those impulses. They are things that are produced by my body, like hair and fingernails, that can be managed. I need not identify with and obey them.
One can achieve a distance from those feelings and impulses(and the resulting dukkha) by focusing our consciousness into a clear nonjudgmental awareness. In doing so, one can simply watch the Self (one’s brain) creating the feelings and impulses.
From such an insightful nonjudgmental stance those feelings can be held, “cradled” if you will, and released. One need not be driven to execute those judgments reactively. It’s all insight with no judgment.

The result of such a successful practice is that, when one clearly sees the product of the Self, one is freed from the necessity to respond reactively, as instructed. In Western practices this resultant state has been called liberation or Big Mind. Eastern terms for it include Enlightenment, Nirvana, et alia. One backs away from, adopts a different view of one’s Self, allowing the intercession of rational, dispassionate judgment and subsequent action that creates less pain for oneself and others. Another result of not being possessed by ones feelings is that one sees the situation from the viewpoint of others, thereby reducing social divisiveness. Deep practitioners even report arriving at the view that the boundaries that divide one person from another are ephemeral and they accept the identity and unity of all living things.

In a very small way, some mindfulness has been understood in the West as long as there has been writing. For example, mother’s advice to “count to ten when you get angry, rather than act out” is evidence of a subliminal understanding in our culture of the process for evading the need to behave reactively. The practice of mindfulness merely involves a deeper understanding of this and specific practice for achieving it on a regular basis. Things do get complicated, though. It can be easily seen that judgmental & reactive behavior is often very useful and adaptive; seeing a red light and stopping on the brake is a clear and simple example. A clear nonjudgmental awareness can allow those to proceed as designed, while holding and distancing oneself from those that might cause dukkha or conflict.

There are a number of elements in the practice of mindfulness but the lion’s share of it is a very understandable process called meditation. During mindfulness meditation one simply sits and observes what is going on in ones consciousness. Much has been written about mindfulness meditation and what I present here will be overly concise. Suffice to say that mindfulness meditation is the process of achieving, generally while sitting, a clear nonjudgmental awareness that observes everything that is occurring in your body and mind at each moment of meditation. The first step is that you will witness that your Self is throwing myriad judgments and instructions at you. Practitioners have described this as like standing in flowing water and watching it rush by. In fact, this initial insight has been labeled, “entering the stream” in Buddhism. Later on one is able to identify individual judgments and instructions, examine them and then, if desired, disassociate from them. This dramatically reduces the power that these judgments/instructions have over one's immediate behavior and sense of well-being. The nonjudgmental part of this attentiveness is essential. What we seek insight about is the very process of judgment and its concomitant behavioral impetus.

Something further that our Self does that exacerbates the mindless reactivity problem is that it pushes us to review the judgments it has made and, effectively, to practice them until we get it right! That is accomplished by rumination. When our brains are not occupied with an immediate need we run narratives, generally stories of the past (how we should have behaved in that instance) and of the future (this is how we should behave when a particular situation arises). Thus, throwing a monkey wrench into that ruminative machinery is viewed as essential in weakening the automatic reactivity with which we are plagued. That monkey wrench involves the common phrase, “be here now”. Focusing on what we are doing in this very moment, besides enriching our lives by perceiving things we would overlook if we were buried in our heads, reduces the time we spend in rumination. Such practice is viewed by experts as being as important as meditation.

A Little History

In this writing I have made occasional reference to “Eastern religions”. Although a number of such religions have schools that function in a very similar manner to what I have articulated here, 90% of the mindfulness practice in history has been Buddhist so, for reasons of brevity(and the limitations of my own fund of knowledge), I will refer to its history when necessary.

Buddhism first came to the West in a big way in the mid-1900’s initially through the efforts of an English barrister by the name of Christmas Humphreys. Having travelled to the East and practiced, he got an inkling of the benefits available from such a practice. He wrote extensively, both expository writings detailing the beliefs and practices of Buddhism and the details of practicing. During this time much of the original translation of Buddhist materials from Pali and Sanskrit to English were made. These suffered from the difficulty of translating from languages we did not understand and communicating with those trying to help us and are, therefore, highly imperfect. His work spanned the landscape of different schools of Buddhism. He edited and helped publish the complete works of D.T. Suzuki, considered to be the definitive Western articulation of Japanese Zen schools. Humphrey’s writings embraced some of the metaphysical and supernatural facets that had grown into Buddhism. A fully secular model of these ideas was yet to come. It came shortly thereafter from Stephen Batchelor & John Kabat-Zinn(see below).

The reception of Buddhist ideas in the west varied dramatically between a few who embraced them and the majority that disdained and dismissed them. This poor reception by a large majority in the West, even the academic world arose from:

In the West we have reached our high standard of living by engaging our logical and thought processes. However, reasoning is the tool that the Self uses, driven of course by visceral impetus, to determine a judgment and then to fashion a particular desired response. The idea that thought must be transcended by a non-logical process in order to gain a more valuable state of consciousness was dismissed by many.
Embracing the “driving” nature of our Selves, what has often been referred to as the Protestant ethic, has been a strong motivator for Western productivity and high standard of living. The idea that our process of motivation should be held at a distance and, at times, dismissed, was not well received. The idea that we must “sit back” and forgo productivity, at any particular time rather than to obey our instincts and drive forward, was very foreign.

We are suspicious of activities that have been closely associated with foreign adaptive fictions, especially when history does not show a clear correlation between those practices and the healthy living we seek. For example, most Japanese Zen schools supported the military expansion that led to World War II. I think it can be easily argued that the result of that war did not resemble “healthy living.” Just as with Western religions, Eastern practices have generally been co-opted as social control mechanisms for eusocial/tribal groups, somewhat negating the beneficial spiritual effects of the practice.
In the mid 1900’s most Westerners still accepted their own adaptive fictions that were not consistent with Buddhist ideas.

Later in the 20th century many open-minded Westerners who had rejected organized religions, embraced Eastern religious practices, adaptive fictions and all and reported significant improvement in their lives. In addition, some academicians in the West, having rejected adaptive fictions, began to view the Buddha as a seat-of-the-pants psychologist rather than a religious leader and worked to articulate and apply, in a secular fashion, the model of human behavior he had innovated. Stephen Batchelor, for example, spent years living as a Zen monk in Japan and studying the religion. The title of one of his last books, Beyond Buddhism, tells us where his years of study took him.

Those who understood this mindful model of human behavior struggled to apply and study it. Neuroscience can only vaguely describe what happens during the process of insight, for example when someone feels a sharp anger at someone else, then sees that he felt “dismissed” by that person, the same way he had been dismissed by his parents as a child, sits with it, and lets it go. Therefore, as was the case with Sigmund Freud and the Psychoanalytic model, the best place to go with this new mindfulness knowledge was not the university but to apply it in the medical world. Jon Kabat-Zinn of U. Mass(my alma mater!) focused mindfulness techniques initially towards the management of chronic pain. His Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction(MBSR) was embraced by his colleagues and accepted by health insurance companies as a major innovation reducing the need for opiate therapy. Soon thereafter MBSR was expanded to treat depression, anxiety, chronic pain, cancer, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, skin and immune disorders as well.

Before long mindfulness techniques were applied to general psychotherapy in the form of MBCT(Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy) and ACT(Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The military has found it useful both as a treatment and a partially-preventative measure for PTSD and for improving combat efficiency. Silicon valley and other companies have adopted it to improve employee satisfaction and productivity. The uses of mindfulness continue to expand, well beyond the scope of this introductory essay.

Scientific and empirical evidence

Empirical evidence from mindfulness came initially from its application in a religious context, but, unlike Freudian Psychoanalysis, while having been applied almost exclusively in the medical realm, mindfulness has simultaneously been taken into the laboratory and neuroscientists are measuring, to what extent they can, the changes that occur in the brain from during and after mindfulness practice. Unfortunately, only when thoughts can be fully mapped out in the brain will we be able to scientifically specify the mechanisms of mindfulness. However, much like other parts of our body, sections of the brain grow in size from use and wither from disuse. The process that effects this is called neuroplasticity and by measuring it we can accurately monitor changes in size and activity of various ganglia under any circumstances we can recreate in the laboratory. Of course we can also gather extensive empirical data on behavior change.

Presented here is just a tiny sample of the observations that have been made in scientific studies. Those who engage in extended mindfulness meditation…

have a decrease both in the size and activity in the Amygala (responsible for anger and emergency response)[8]
experience a decrease in blood pressure [7] and it is used to treat hypertension
have an increased cortical thickness, particularly in brain regions associated with attention, interoception (perception of internal bodily states), and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.[9]
experience a decrease in Default Mode activity, that area responsible for mindless rumination[10]. Note that the Default Mode Network is a complex array of ganglia in the brain and is therefore not pictured in the diagram above. It encompasses the posterior and anterior cortical midline structures, with major hubs being located in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the angular gyrus.
experience improved prefrontal cortex (PFC) functions like cognition, self-awareness, attention, and memory and reduced psychological symptoms[11].
experience a reduction of age-related brain degeneration and the improvement of cognitive functions and a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s.[16]

By meditating, we strengthen the parts of our brains that are more peaceful, logical and self aware, while shrinking the more primitive areas of the brain. Research has even shown that regular mindfulness meditation reduces an endogenous chemical that may adversely affect our immunity[6]. There is a caveat, however. The positive results of a mindfulness meditation are counterbalanced by a very small percentage of instances in which meditators have adverse psychological reactions. These are few and far between and usually related to preexisting psychotic or affective disorders[5].

Wider application of mindfulness

All of the early empirical evidence about the usefulness of mindful meditation for yielding physical and psychological health came from Eastern religious practice. That evidence is muddled by deep involvement with adaptive fictions and with the natural use of religion for social controls that, along with parochial altruism, provided strong coalescence for Eastern eusocial/tribal groups. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” was a common social attitude in the East as well as in the West. Many Zen schools, for example, adopted martial arts and battled among themselves. Thus, there arose a strong desire in the west to pull the wisdom of mindfulness from the swamp of metaphysics and social control.

A deeper understanding of the process wherein the “Self forms a judgment” is warranted here. The first step of a “judgment” occurs when your senses identify a thing, person or event. That identification and the decision about whether it is significant enough to warrant attention occurs in the parietal lobe[12]. What happens thereafter is not fully understood, but we do know that a motive was involved in determining its significance. All of our behaviors have some sort of a biological impetus. Remember that our brains evolved exclusively to protect and replicate our DNA; the first step in any cerebral process is a motive. In homo sapiens, three types of such motives have genetically evolved into our brains, each corresponding to one of the “agents” your brain uses to protect and replicate your DNA.

Ones body, oneself. Quite obviously, the brain presents strong motivations to protect and feed the body and produce offspring.
Family. We have evolved altruistic motivations to protect our DNA through those to whom we are genetically related. The extent to which we will sacrifice for family was extensively documented by W.D. Hamilton[13].
Eusocial/Tribal group. By adopting different roles in defense of a common nest, homo sapiens began to evolve in a eusocial paradigm, embarking on a coalitionary, combative history[14]. We have evolved parochial altruism, support of the eusocial/tribal group, first genetically and then modified by cultural evolution. The idea of cultural evolution goes back to Charles Darwin and has been expanded upon by many since. Opinions vary dramatically about about how much genetics and how much cultural evolution is responsible for our current tribal behavior but that is not relevant to this proposed application of mindfulness.

The vast majority of mindfulness study and practice, historically in the East and in a secular manner in the West, involves judgments affecting 1) the individual. Every school of mindful practice talks about transcending the Self, freeing oneself from the judgments and dictates of the Self. Practitioners describe ceasing to view the world exclusively through their own eyes as leading to a universal altruism that we call compassion. However, we go through the same process of perception, judgment, possible intervening behavior, and dukkha in relation to the other two dominions of motivation as well, family and tribe. For brevity let us skip over the relatedness issue(inclusive fitness) and discuss eusocial/tribal cerebral events. Being unaware of the eusocial/tribal nature of homo sapiens, the historical Eastern sources of mindfulness applied it exclusively to matters of personal dukkha, but mindfulness can be used elsewhere as well.

The eusocial/tribal drive is experienced as a strong desire to coalesce with those whom we think are of our “quality”. We are motivated to view other groups and their members as inferior and to defeat them when it is to our advantage. Essentially we are biologically/culturally saddled with the urge to “gang up and fight”. Of course we have seen this throughout history as group coalescence (tribes, city state, nations) and virtually constant combat between them. Fortunately there are ways that this coalitionary cognition (as David Sloan Wilson calls it) can be sublimated, exercised in a non-fatal way. We see its expression in homo sapiens early in life in the form of school gangs and cliques. Later on we have an endless number of team sports and fraternal organizations that allow us to work out this drive in non-injurious ways.

Let us compare two theoretical instances of judgment and dukkha, one from individual motives and one from group motives.

Someone’s Self tells him/her that one particular other person is the one he/she needs for a life mate.
Someone subsequently witnesses that other person with someone else in a romantic situation clearly indicating that this other person will not mate with him/her.
This triggers a strong feeling we call jealousy. The Self is telling us that we MUST mate with that one particular person and that if that does not occur, things are not at all right. Dukkha descends.
We embrace the judgment of our Self(dukkha now arises) which instructs us to appeal to the loved one and vanquish the competitor. Furthermore, we likely employ what psychologists call confirmation bias to reach the conclusion that both of those other people are not worthy of us (unless the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance intrudes, but that is beyond the scope here). The result of this is that we are miserable and in conflict for some extended period.

Here is an instance of judgment motivated by the eusocial/tribal motive:

The Selves of the leaders of Country A tell them that their interests are being economically threatened by Country B and they dictate to Country B a specific limitation of how they may trade with Country A.
Country B refuses to allow Country A to trade with it in the manner they wish.
The leaders of Country A view Country B to be wrong, inferior (“or they would have the good sense to submit to our will”), and that things will not be right until Country B bows to their will.

4) Leaders embrace that judgment(dukkha now arises) and they employ confirmation bias to formulate an understanding that we are right and they are wrong. This will generate ill-feeling and conflict with that nation for a long period of time.

Note the strongly dualistic nature of these judgments. Our Self deals in strong plus-minus dichotomies (good/bad, yes/no, love/hate, right/wrong). If the individual in the first example had a strong mindfulness practice he/she might be able to see that he/she is the creator of that feeling of jealousy and that he/she need not identify with that feeling and can separate from it and transcend it. I realize that I have presented an extreme case; such jealousy is a very strong emotion and even a clear nonjudgmental awareness will not dispel it rapidly, but over time a mindful practice will allow the individual to separate from that emotion over a much shorter period of time, release feelings of blame towards one or the other perceived transgressor, and avoid confrontational behavior.

In the second example, if the leaders of Country A were able to see that they are regarding Country B as inferior because of their DNA-encoded tribal drives, and that in reality Country B is no more oppositional or inferior than Country A, that it would be natural for Country B to do whatever is in its interest, the leaders of Country A could shake off the feeling that Country B is "inferior" and should be expected to do what they demand. Relationships between the two nations would be much more peaceful and cooperative henceforth.

The coalitionary (tribal/cultural) impetus we feel to join and fight is very strong. It does not take much for our perception to be skewed by it. Recall the “Domino Theory” concocted in the late 60’s to justify our war in Viet Nam(the idea that if we did not stop communism in Viet Nam it would engulf the entire world, country by country). Instead, in the remaining years of the century, many communist countries found a socialist economic system to be poverty-inducing and moved to a market-based system. In short, this coalitionary cognition pushed our brains to skew reality so hard that that theory was really quite delusional. If the coalitionary motive can be managed mindfully, inter-group relations would improve immensely.

The difficulties involved in applying mindfulness in the international theater would be immense. National leaders nowadays generally have strong Selves, do not wish to deny the inclinations that their Selves push upon them. They are inclined to accept the idea that their nation is better than others and should dictate to them and control them, identify with that idea and execute it. They would need to understand that their brains lie to them regularly[15] and they would need the skill to see that. Furthermore, the United States is one of the most religious countries in the world and many of our public servants embrace adaptive fictions that confirm their nation-centered view of the world. An evolution of religious practice, such as is currently proffered in ProSocial Spirituality, towards personal and group spirituality and away from the mind-bending effects of adaptive fictions, will be essential, but these beliefs are very deeply held. Can this transition occur quickly enough to mend a world that is on the brink of disaster?

The understanding of a mindfulness practice and its necessity for peaceful relationships among nations would need to come first from academia, in nearly a unanimous way. Those in a position to effect foreign policy would need to be “certified mindful” if I may oversimplify. Some of you are laughing at this idea, understandably, because we are so far from approaching that now. But, I can see no reason why mindfulness could not be a strong tool in helping to hobble the eusocial/tribal divisive motive if it were applied rigorously in governments around the world. Whether it is employed as a separate tool or an adjunct to the cultural evolution that is proposed in Prosocial World, the role of mindfulness in our desired alteration of grouping behavior (to be more cooperative than combative) may be considerable.

The recently-expressed concept of mental immunity can be very useful in a world where, exacerbated by electronic media, fact is rapidly falling prey to a populist fiction, and can be strengthened by a mindfulness model. In his book of the same name Andy Norman asks, “When we critically examine an idea, what exactly should we be looking for?”[17] Mindful insight of the emotional impetus that is behind the idea is critical both for its etiology and for its cure. We must understand how our brains drive us and lie to us and know how to free ourselves from that in regard to tribal matters.

Last Evolutionary thought

It is clear that a mindfulness practice(in transcendence of the Self) is adaptive in the current world, helping individuals to be more at peace, more productive and less combative, but that evolutionary advantage may only be contemporary. It is not clear that the ability to transcend ones Self was adaptive one million years ago. Throughout the millennia, most of the time, the person who was mindlessly reactive and combative, although left suffering with dukkha, was also left standing with a bloody club in his hand while those suffused with peace, joy and equanimity were dead on the ground. How then did the ability to “occupy a clear non-judgmental awareness” evolve into the human brain? Is it merely a spandrel?

Let me speculate on that. In lower animals we see behaviors that are relatively simple and automatically elicited upon perception of a specific stimulus. As we go up the phylogenetic tree and neural systems get more and more complicated we begin to see behaviors that are formulated after the perception of a stimulus, by sensual perception and cognition. We get to think about it before making a decision. Furthermore, as we go up that phylogenetic tree, a larger and larger percentage of behaviors seem to involve the possibility of contemplation. Either we can react simply and mindlessly or apply our senses and reason to the situation. Of course, this took an enormous leap in homo sapiens with our large forebrains and thus, we have apparently evolved a greater ability to decide to apply mindful observation. A mindfulness practice, then, could simply be an attempt to apply that self-and-environment observation skill in a rigorous and exhaustive manner.

Either that or it's merely an evolutionary spandrel. You decide!

[1] Buddhism is True by Robert Wright(Princeton, U. Penn) - Simon & Schuster 2017

[2] The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings by Thich Nhat Hanh - Parallax Press / Harmony

[3] Secular Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor - Yale Univ Press 2017

[4] Deeper Mindfulness by Mark Williams, et al. (Oxford U) - Platkus 2023

[5] Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing by Willoughby Britton, et al. (Brown U.)

[6] David Creswell, et al (6/1/2016), Alterations in Resting-State Functional Connectivity Link Mindfulness Meditation With Reduced Interleuken-6: A Randomized Control Trial. Biological Psychiatry magazine

[7] Current Perspectives on the Use of Meditation to Reduce Blood Pressure

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3303565/

[8] Meditation and yoga practice are associated with smaller right amygdala volume: the Rotterdam study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6302143/

[9]The Neuroscience of Meditation and its Impact on Memory
https://neurosciencenews.com/memory-meditation-23414/

[10] Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task - Garrison, et al - https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13415-015-0358-3

[11] Functional Connectivity of Prefrontal Cortex in Various Meditation Techniques - M. Rathore,et al - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10026337/

[12] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/anatomy of the brain

[13] The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I. Hamilton, W. D. (1964). Bibcode:1964JThBi...7....1H. doi:10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4. PMID 5875341J

[14] The Evolution of Eusociality - E.O. Wilson, Tarnita & Nowak https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09205

[15] The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt - Vintage/Random House 2013

[16] Mindfulness Meditation Is Related to Long-Lasting Changes in Hippocampal Functional Topology during Resting State: A Magnetoencephalography Study - https://www.hindawi.com/journals/np/2018/5340717/

[17] Mental Immunity - Andy Norman - Harper Collins 2021